Effective question-asking is a crucial component of a successful conversational chatbot. It could help the bots manifest empathy and render the interaction more engaging by demonstrating attention to …
While the biases of language models in production are extensively documented, the biases of their guardrails have been neglected. This paper studies how contextual information about the user influence…
Emotions are an integral part of human cognition and they guide not only our understanding of the world but also our actions within it. As such, whether we soothe or flame an emotion is not inconseque…
Introducing EMONET-FACE & EMONET-VOICE: A New Foundation To address these challenges, we developed the EMONET suites. At their core is a novel 40-category emotion taxonomy, meticulously derived from …
“Using chatbots to deliver recommendations is increasingly popular. The design of recommendation chatbots has primarily been taking an information-centric approach by focusing on the recommended conte…
“Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance in many fields, such as reasoning, language understanding, and math problem-solving, and are regarded as an important step to artifi…
We develop an empathetic persuasive dialogue system by fine-tuning a Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE)-based language model in a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework. To design feedbacks for our RL…
Human conversations transcend mere words, orchestrated as a multimedia experience where tonal inflections, facial dynamics, and gestural semantics are interwoven. Physiological signatures, measured t…
Abstract: There is much discussion of the false outputs that generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok create. In popular terminology, these have been dubbed AI halluci…
Sentiment transfer is one popular example of a text style transfer task, where the goal is to reverse the sentiment polarity of a text. With a sentiment reversal comes also a reversal in meaning. We i…
Description automatically generated](file:////Users/adrianchan/Library/Group%20Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/TemporaryItems/msohtmlclip/clip_image011.png) When the user needs further attention during …
In response to the LLM CENTAUR [Binz et al., 2025], Bowers et al. [2025] argued that CENTAUR is unlikely to contribute to building a theory of human cognition for three reasons: First, CENTAUR was not…
Linguistic coordination is a well-established phenomenon in spoken conversations and often associated with positive social behaviors and outcomes. While there have been many attempts to measure lexica…
Amidst a shortage of qualified mental health professionals, the integration of large language models (LLMs) into psychological applications offers a promising way to alleviate the growing burden of me…
identity of a conversation partner, as a human or computer, matters. Previous work has found that the mere perceived identity of the partner as computer or human has profound effects, even when actual…
However, the exploration of RLVR for enhancing dialogue capabilities faces several key obstacles: • the lack of a stable, realistic, and scalable environment for multi-turn conversational rollouts; …
Communication scholars began studying our interactions with the technologies themselves. Several studies documented our tendency to treat computers as if they are autonomous social actors (Reeves & Na…
Chin said previous studies showed that existing algorithms did not accurately identify various stages of users’ motivation. She and Bak designed a study to test how well large language models, which a…
“AI psychosis” or “delusional spiraling” is an emerging phenomenon where AI chatbot users find themselves dangerously confident in outlandish beliefs after extended chatbot conversations. This phenome…
Large language models can represent a variety of personas but typically default to a helpful Assistant identity cultivated during post-training. We investigate the structure of the space of model pers…
Armed with two main questions: 1. Do enough language cues exist to discern truth from deceptive conversations without other multimodal cues; and 2. Can a class of algorithmic detectors identify these …
Topic modeling analyzes documents to learn meaningful patterns of words. However, existing topic models fail to learn interpretable topics when working with large and heavy-tailed vocabularies. To thi…
This work proposes a new benchmark for empathetic dialogue generation and EMPATHETICDIALOGUES, a novel dataset of 25k conversations grounded in emotional situations. Our experiments indicate that dial…
Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are increasingly building language models with warm and empathetic personas that millions of people now use for advice, therapy, and companionship. Here, we sho…